Another 130 US military personnel have arrived in Iraq on what the Pentagon described as a temporary mission to assess the scope of the humanitarian crisis facing thousands of displaced Iraqi civilians trapped on Sinjar Mountain.
Chuck Hagel, the US defence secretary, announced the deployment on Tuesday, saying that “this is not a combat boots on the ground kind of operation”.
Another defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the extra troops were Marines and special operations forces whose mission was to assess the situation in the Sinjar area and to develop additional humanitarian assistance options beyond current US efforts there.
The 130 troops, who are in addition to 250 US military advisers already in Baghdad and Erbil, arrived on Tuesday in the city of Erbil, well east of Sinjar.
They are to work with representatives of the State Department and the US Agency for International Development to prevent potential acts of genocide by the fighters of the so called Islamic State who forced them from their villages, the defence official said
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